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问
Most people do not arrive with a pattern. They arrive with a complaint: sleep that breaks at three, a mind that will not settle, a tiredness that rest does not fix. These six pages start from the complaint, in the words people use for it, and walk to the tradition’s way of reading it — the pictures behind it, what the kitchen offers, one point, and the line where a page stops and a person is needed.
The six
What these pages are
Nobody arrives at a clinic saying they have yin deficiency. They arrive saying they wake at three, or that their skin has flared again, or that they have been tired since the spring. The tradition’s own examination begins there too. Of the four classical ways of gathering information — 望闻问切, looking, listening, asking and feeling the pulse — asking is the largest, and asking begins with the complaint, in the words the person uses for it.
These six pages are written in that order. Each starts from the word you may have arrived with and says plainly that we do not use it, because the tradition never gathered complaints under those headings. Then it walks to what the tradition does instead: the classical name and the texts that first described it, the pictures it is usually sorted into, what makes it heavier and what eases it, what the kitchen has traditionally offered, one point you can press yourself, and the line past which a page is the wrong tool.
Two things they are not. They are not a list of illnesses, and they do not name yours; the word at the top of each page is a complaint, not a verdict. And they are not a substitute for the reading, which is the one place a person’s thirty answers and their tongue are read together and one picture is chosen. A page has to describe every picture a complaint can hide. A reading is allowed to choose.
To know by looking is called divine; by listening, sage; by asking, craft; by feeling the pulse, skill.
Side by side
Read across rather than down: the same complaint hides different pictures, and the same picture hides under different complaints. Every row links to the full entry.
| Concern | How it tends to show up | The pictures behind it | What tends to ease it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Waking at three in the morning | Awake at a fixed small hour; hot or dreaming; the day paid for it. | Yin deficiency, blood deficiency, or a stomach that went to bed full. | Lotus seed, jujube; an early, lighter evening meal; Neiguan. |
| A mind that will not settle | Racing heart; shallow breath; light sleep; dread without an object; startles easily. | Thin heart blood, dry yin with heat, or a liver wound tight — usually layered. | Lotus seed, jujube, reishi; earlier nights, warm food; Neiguan with the out-breath. |
| Tired for months | Unrefreshed sleep; effort paid for later; cold, heavy or wired depending on the picture. | Qi deficiency as the ground; yang cold, damp or thin blood on top; yin for the wired kind. | Astragalus or ginseng in the congee for the cold, empty kind; nothing warming for the hot; Zusanli. |
| Digestion you cannot predict | Bloating by evening; cramp that eases on the toilet; loose then stuck; worse under strain. | Spleen qi deficiency underneath, damp on top, the liver leaning on both. | Ginger and rice congee, tangerine peel, poria; warm, plain, at fixed hours; Zusanli. |
| Skin that itches and flares | Itch that moves; weeping in a flare; rough dry patches between flares. | Wind and damp on top; thin blood underneath when it has gone on for years. | Job’s tears, poria, chrysanthemum tea; provoking foods set aside in a flare; Hegu. |
| Headaches that keep coming back | One-sided throb with warning signs; or dull and tired; or heavy with nausea. | Liver yang rising on a thin-blood or yin-deficient ground; phlegm-damp for the heavy kind. | Chrysanthemum and mulberry-leaf tea; regular meals and sleep; no alcohol; Hegu between attacks. |
The line under each of them
Every one of the six ends the same way, with a section called When this is not the right frame, and the list under it is the most carefully written part of the page. A complaint is the tradition’s starting point, but it is also the place where the tradition can see least. A headache, a tiredness, a racing heart: each has causes that a reading cannot see and must not delay, and most of them are found by an ordinary examination where you live.
So the order of operations is fixed. If anything in that list is true of you, the page is not for you yet; see a clinician licensed where you live first, and come back with what they found. Once the ruling-out has been done, the tradition has a great deal to say, and the pages say it. Written the other way round, they would be dangerous, and we would rather not have written them. How a reading is made
Questions
Because that is the order a consultation runs in. Nobody arrives saying they have yin deficiency; they arrive saying they wake at three. The tradition’s own examination begins with asking, and asking begins with the complaint in the person’s own words. The pattern pages are where each of these six ends up; these are where a reader starts.
No. Each page opens with the word most people search for and says plainly that we do not use it. The word at the top of a page is a complaint, not a verdict. If a clinician where you live has given you a name for what you carry, keep it; the tradition’s description sits beside it and replaces nothing.
Because a complaint is the place where the tradition can see least. A headache, a tiredness or a racing heart each has causes that a reading cannot see and must not delay, and most of them are found by an ordinary examination. The list at the foot of every page is the most carefully written part of it, and it comes before anything above it.
Start with the one that costs you most, then read its nearest neighbour: sleep with the mind, tiredness with digestion, skin with headaches. Complaints travel in company, and the useful thing to notice is how often the same picture sits under two of them. That shared picture, rather than either complaint, is what a reading is written about.
The reading
These pages are written for everyone who arrives with the same complaint, which means they are written for nobody in particular. A reading is the opposite: thirty questions, one photograph of your tongue, and a document written in English for you alone by a physician licensed in China, sent within 48 hours.